1. New guidelines from the SEC and other regulatory bodies will assist the growth & adoption of both blockchain and crypto asset trading.

The SEC has become increasingly more vocal across the community on expressing their point of view. Multiple companies continue to lobby the SEC for a bitcoin exchange-traded fund (ETF) with serious backing from industry powerhouses like the NYSE.

2. There will be a substantial increase in the blockchain transaction speed, which will inspire the development of real life, end-user applications aimed for daily use.

Transaction speed, cost, and scale have all been major hurdles in both enterprise and general mass scale adoption of this technology. The tech community has been working on several platforms, including Hedera Hashgraph, EOS, and others to solve these issues. We expect the capabilities of these platforms to be extremely helpful for building real world applications in 2019.

3. The security token market will gain traction, with tokens being traded on the market for accredited investors that will eventually provide enhanced liquidity.

A lot was written and discussed on security tokens and liquidity in 2018. As platforms like Securrency and Polymath launch ready-to-use capabilities like KYC, token creation, integration to exchanges, and more, the concept of security token and its benefits will finally be realized. We see 2019 as the year of the STO.

4. The need for inter-ledger communication will reach a critical stage, forcing many to build access standards across ledgers.

As a blockchain development firm, more of our applications (DAPPs) now have a need to have a presence in multiple ledgers. Teams are creating quick solutions to solve this issue. This need is becoming common enough for more interledger communication utilities and products to be launched.

5. The usage of compute-heavy proof of work-based logic will continue to be the consensus protocol of the past.

Almost every new blockchain or distributed ledger platform either has some combination of proof of stake and other consensus logic to build consensus. For example, the alternative blockchain Hedera Hashgraph utilizes an innovative gossip protocol to build consensus. We expect Proof-of-work protocol to be primarily used in Bitcoin as it has in the past.